O Shenandoah! Country Reckoning/November

Spirit and Flesh By Grace Willetts

I am the midwife for Bubba's death. She has been dying for three weeks now. I visit her before and after I teach my exercise class at the convalescent hospital. She can't walk and can barely pull the blanket up around her. In class, I throw the ball to one old woman after another. Just a month ago Bubba was here, shaking her fist at me playfully. She was one of the strongest. Wylene, an Alzheimer's patient in a green and brown flowered polyester dress, squints at me and throws the ball right at my face. "Here comes the big one!" she shrieks. I rub my nose. If the ball was any harder, it would have made me bleed. Fortunately, it's nothing more than a thick balloon. I retrieve it from the side of Mary's chair and throw it to her. Mary is a trip. She's a hundred and four and still sharp as a tack. She has a long pointed chin and a mop of curly hair than make her look like a shrunken witch, but she has a sweet creak of a voice and can land a beanbag on a target better than I can. When all thirteen patients have caught it three times in a row, I stop. "That's all for today. I'll see you next week!" I call out to them, waving. Either they don't hear me or they've forgotten already. The ones that are pretty sharp are, on the whole, deaf, and the ones that can hear usually can't focus. Such is old age in the euphemistic home. "Goodbye!" Mabel nods at me. She is the queen of the group, a big woman with a missing right arm. "See you next week, God willing." Mabel takes nothing for granted. She's had cancer, gangrene, and congestive heart disease, but she's still outlived her children. I walk down the hall to Bubba's room. This hospital is cleaner than most, but it's not what you might call cheery. There is a definite smell of urine and uncleaned teeth in the air. A small woman with wavy white hair and a pug nose scoots her chair toward me. "Help me, please help me," she says in a soft squeak. "Help me, help me." It is more a chant than a plea. I pat her shoulder and she grabs my hand and kisses it. I sidestep her. The pink curtain is drawn around the bed in what looks like a bid for privacy. I poke my head around, not knowing what to expect. Could she have passed away during the hour I was teaching? I wonder. She is lying on her side, her mouth open. I lean toward her. This time she recognizes me. The first time I came to visit she didn't, and she kept staring with wide eyes as if I were translucent. "Come on, come on," she says, beckoning with both hands. "Come on, come on!" She is caught up in a natural rhythm I let happen. The skin on the side of her face is slack, as if it were melting into the bed. I put down my knapsack and sit in the wheelchair beside her bed. There is nowhere else to go except the bed, and I'm afraid of crushing her leg if I settled down there. She begins speaking in Russian. I understand some of what she's saying: first head, then heart, then bad, then old. I studied Russian in college, but the amount I remember is pitiful. "Ya ponemaiu," I say, I understand. I will myself to understand, to thrust myself into the bloodline of her words. I take her hand. Russian is followed by a short English phrase. "You teach exercise today?" she asks. "Da," I answer. Yes. She continues to talk of her symptoms today: a pounding heart, kapungakapungkapung when she sits up in the wheelchair, the pain in her head. "I am old," she says. I nod. She is ninety, if I remember correctly. "I die soon." She draws in a series of small breaths, all high in her chest. "I die." I nod and cover her hand with my other one. There is no getting around it. A recovery at ninety is unlikely. Her hands grasp mine in soft pulses, on and off, on and off. We sit like that for some time. I'll stay as long as she wants me to. Though sick, Bubba still has an acute sense of social order: when a decent interval of time has passed, she'll thank me and ask if I can stop next time I'm in the building. She drops my hand and feigns making a muscle with her slack arm. "You strong," she says. "You have a husband?" I nod. "Do you have any children?" I shake my head. "I am all alone," she says. She falls back on the bed and closes her eyes. Is this it? Is death creeping over her, ready to pop her out of her own body? She opens her eyes. No. "Ay, my stomach. Mnyeh plohah." I feel bad. I nod. "Ya ponemaiu." She nods back and wipes her mouth with a towel that's on her pillow. "You teach the exercise class?" I continue nodding. She's really all loose skin and bones and a dandelion poof of white hair. I think of her back in Russia, walking through the snow to school in the black afternoon. "I love you," she says. "Thank you for coming." I don't feel like going home yet, and I don't have any more engagements for the day. I used to watch Oprah every afternoon, but I've grown out of television lately. A few exits down the freeway I veer to the right and get off at the Benez Street exit. I haven't been to MacFrugal's yet. MacFrugal's is the greatest place. It's retail without the middlemen, and as a result everything costs less than ten dollars. It's real, namebrand stuff too, things you would normally buy, but they're so cheap you can buy a lot. The downside is that you never know what they'll have in stock, so when I see something I like, I have to buy about three of them. I grab a shopping cart. I never know what I'll find. My stock of bath gel is running low, so I start at the bath section. Aromatherapy soaps are still here, and I pick up three. No new kinds of bath gel, but the brand I got last week is still here and I pick up another bottle. It pays to be stocked up, I think. For the past few months I've really been into bath and body products. My mother was very minimalist, Dial soap and that was it, and I like to think I'm overcompensating for a childhood of few enticing smells. Behind the soap is a gift set of a well-known perfume and I grab that too. If I don't use it, it might make a good gift for someone. Last year I was into luggage, and while my husband didn't tell me to stop buying or anything, he did start looking at me strangely, especially when he opened my closet to get something and there were about ten tote bags and suitcases lined up. People who know me well know better than to tell me what to do, so he didn't say anything at the time, probably from fear of driving me to buy more. But he and my best friend Samantha started making jokes about my luggage habit, and I stopped talking about the latest great bargain. I just really liked the idea of bags, even though we don't travel that much; for some reason I find their shape pleasing. Then I read in a magazine that if you have to hide something from people you're in trouble, so I stopped cold turkey. I'm like that, pretty disciplined when I want to be. I spy a container of lotion, something my husband will probably need in the future. He has very dry skin. I was a child bride at twenty-one and we've been married forever, ten years, so I can cater to these petty details. A middle-aged woman in curlers lazily pushes her cart parallel to mine, picking up hemorrhoid medicine and q-tips. A lot of people with big families come here to get kid clothes, but since I'm childless I can afford to be shallow and indulge my appetite for shampoo, soap, and makeup. I'm supposed to be an artist, but I've been blocked lately, so my medium has been my body. A good Italian fast food place is next door to the store. I have six dollars in my wallet, enough for a spaghetti special. You get garlic bread, a big plate of spaghetti, a salad, and a drink for only four dollars and ninety-nine cents. I grab my paperback novel from my car and read while I eat. I am hungry, and the hot tomato sauce stings the roof of my mouth. I wonder if this is something doctors do, wolf down their dinner after seeing their patients. The week passes and I am at the convalescent hospital again. I am early, so I go to Bubba's room. Her name is not on the doorway, and the bed is empty. It has happened. She has passed away, just as she said she would. I run up to a nurse's aide, a pretty Phillipino with a ponytail that stretches down her back. "Bubba, what happened to her?" I ask. She looks at me blankly. "The Russian lady, Ana Pestlosky is her real name---" "Ah," she says. "She's across the way. In room 56 A." I practically run around the corner to the other side of the building. Sure enough, Bubba is there, her eyes closed. I touch her shoulder and she opens them. "Bubba? It's me, the exercise teacher." She shakes her head, then makes her eyes rest on my face. "Ah!" she says. She reaches for my hand. It is on the tip of my tongue to ask if she think she's any closer, and what it feels like, but I don't. "How are you, Bubba?" A long stream of Russian follows. "My stomach, and my head." She wipes her mouth. "How is your husband?" she asks. "Fine." "Do you have babies?" I don't. I can't, actually, but that is a long story. I shake my head and pat her knee. "Ten years I have been here. I am old. I die." I nod and squeeze her hand. She is getting there, I can feel her pushing onto the next stage. She's almost there, if I'm any judge. Sustaining life is now a pressure that's bearing down on her too hard; she's going to give soon and slip into release. A tear leaks over the side of her face. Her eyes are bald, the lashes pale or fallen out. She wipes it. "Spaceba." Thank you. This is my cue to leave. I stand up. "No problem." "You come back?" The tears have gone as suddenly as they came. Who knows who or what they were for? "I promise I will. Next week when I'm here again." I have done MacFrugal's already that week, and I feel the need for a little luxury after sitting on the wheelchair next to her that stank of some form of waste. I drive toward home, then get off where there's a mall. Macy's. I want to wander in Macy's. I pull in the parking lot and park. Macy's smells good inside, like expensive cookies and lipstick. I wander in the shoe section, then look at purses. They don't carry Paloma Picasso, though, and I'm tired of purses anyway. I wander to the cosmetics aisle. After McFrugal's retail seems like it's for the birds, especially since I have a ton of makeup now. Twenty dollars for an eyeshadow? I don't think so. The clerk behind the perfume counter is a man, which is unusual. Progress comes in all forms. I pick up the new fragrance by Chanel and spray it on liberally. I've got to get the hospital stink from the base of my nose, where it's settled. Poor Bubba. Well, it's all a part of being human, the decay and all. Not being able to control your bladder or bowels. Your flesh rotting right off you and not being able to wash. "Can I help you?" the clerk asks. He is good looking, with chin-length blonde hair and a small goatee. "Do you have any samples of this?" I ask, brandishing the big glass bottle. "Not a one, sorry. They flew out of the store. It's a lovely fragrance, though, isn't it?" I nod. I can't see spending forty more dollars this week. My husband is in insurance and we do okay, but I don't feel I've earned the right to spend too much, say over sixty a week, on myself. I teach, but not a lot; my extra time is supposed to be spent painting. I used to create my art feverishly, but that was before the bottom fell out of the market and I could get something for my sweat. Forty dollars. I smile and walk away from the counter. The chunk of money, which isn't so big but will add to my mounting expenses, rests heavy on my heart, and I resist turning back and spending it anyway. The light smell on my arm fades away from my nose after a few minutes and ceases to comfort me. Bubba is no longer surprised to see me when I appear in her door. I must come to her; there is no question that it's a job I've taken. She is the same, melting into the bed. Her eyes remind me of two blue seashells planted in a bleached, white rock. "They all say, 'I love this lady,' " Bubba tells me. "You are popular." "Thank you," I say. I am surprised; I didn't know the women from my exercise class talked about me. I want to understand the Russian, but I'm not so sure it would make sense even if I could translate more quickly. "Rabotola" is a word that comes up frequently, meaning "I worked." She has worked hard her life; in my class alone she always wanted me to pull her as hard as I could so that she could become stronger. "I have no one," she says. She is passing, her head and shoulders sticking through in the new dimension. "Ya ponemaiu." I have no children, and my parents live three thousand miles away. We keep in touch a little. Will I ever be alone? Men never live as long as women, so who knows if fifty years from now I won't be wheeling around this awful place, or lying in a putrid hospital bed? When it's time to go, she pats my stomach. "Baby." It is protruding slightly, because that's where any extra ounces go. I start to shake my head, but stop. Who knows what she can see from the other side? "You are my daughter," she says now. I don't know whether she's got me mixed up with an actual child of hers, but I feel she's talking from a deeper place. I agree. I am.

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"Spirit and Flesh" © Grace Willetts, 1996. All rights reserved.